D&D General Evidence from the Arneson vs Gygax court case, including early draft of D&D with notes

[Shardstone]

I think I might put these original old school first campaign rules into a doc like OSE and play it with these assumptions. sounds fun tbh

 

[deganawida]

I think I might put these original old school first campaign rules into a doc like OSE and play it with these assumptions. sounds fun tbh

Agreed! Though, TBH, I’d love to see a current printing of the Blackmoor (DYAC) rules and setting as close to what the group still plays. In that documentary, they appeared to be having a blast, and must be, considering they’ve been playing it for over 50 years.

 

[zenopus]

Hm, that's a very good point. Comparing the two, they do seem different.

One of the major issues here is that we don't seem to have an example of handwriting from a letter that's unambiguously Arneson's, at least that I can find on a quick search. The closest we have is a few instances of his signature, e.g. page 561, which admittedly does look very similar.

However, checking some other resources I've collected over the years, I realized that I do have a copy of Arneson's handwriting, as there's a scanned copy of the handwritten notes he made regarding Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz's playing through the original City of the Gods in Kuntz's El Raja Key Archive. Looking over those and comparing them to page 15 of this PDF...yeah, it does look almost identical.

I'm convinced; those notes at the beginning are Arneson's.

Looking further, the Defendent's Exhibits are described at page 220; Exhibits 8 (page 13-14) and 9 (page 15) "were prepared by David Megarry at witness' request", and Exhibit 10 (pages 16-17) is handwriting unknown (Arneson later says it's not his on page 296).

These Exhibits are further described by Arneson around page 294. It's not clear to me from a quick review whether these were prepared before or after the 1973 draft document.

 

[Chanceand]

My blog post about sharing the location of the court papers from Dave Arneson's first lawsuit against Gary Gygax and TSR, and the 1973 D&D draft. This is also an introduction to a series looking at the draft.

Unveiling the Past: A Journey Through the July 1973 Draft and D&D’s Foundational Saga - Chance & Circumstance

Discover the untold story behind the July 1973 Dungeons & Dragons draft and its pivotal role in shaping the game's history, as revealed through a deep dive into legal archives and personal research.

chanceand.com

Quick note: To be clear, some of these public records are copyrighted. The distribution of copyrighted material in this court case is not condoned. To view these documents, reach out to the National Archives in Chicago for the best way to do so.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

It was a standard term from military history and wargaming. Like "men and materiel" when referring to military resources. It was gender specific in that older such books do tend to assume that all soldiers are men. Edgar Rice Burroughs used it regularly in his fiction, including one of the Barsoom novels being titled "A Fighting Man of Mars".

Very true. Unless a rule set dealt with a setting/period where female soldiers were fairly common (eg TSR's Legions of the Petal Throne minis rules) "fighting men" was commonplace phrasing in the 60s and 70s. Different times.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

And that’s what the court found.

The fact that the draft of D&D is so similar to the outline notes by Arneson is why Arneson won the legal case.

The court decision is in Arnesons favor.

Okay. I'm mostly not posting for an indefinite period of time.

That said, I need to briefly address this, because it keeps coming up. It's great to see the historical documents. But people need to stop repeating the same incorrect information about the court proceedings.

The court did not find anything. The court did not find in Arneson's favor. There was no judgment from the court, and there was no opinion from the court on those issues. Are we clear? Good.

First, the actual issues in the case were not about who "created D&D," but rather about the specific contract that assigned rights and gave royalties to both Gygax and Arneson. Yes, there were collateral issues raised by affirmative defenses that would go to the issue of how much of a contribution was made to the original rules, but at its heart, this was about construing the contract, and then determining whether or not additional works were covered by the language of the original contract. Okay?

Next, there was no court finding. The case was not resolved at motion practice. It was not resolved at summary judgment. It was headed to a trial, when (at a moment of maximum leverage, given that TSR was booming and they did not want any possible cloud over the IP as they were exploring licensing) ... there was a settlement. That's not a court finding. That's a settlement. The parties reached an agreement (a new, enforceable contract) that resolved the litigation.

Finally, the future litigation involving Arneson (such as the Monster Manual 2 litigation) was not about any additional court findings, but about construing the settlement agreement.


Good? Good.

 

[Alzrius]

Very true. Unless a rule set dealt with a setting/period where female soldiers were fairly common (eg TSR's Legions of the Petal Throne minis rules) "fighting men" was commonplace phrasing in the 60s and 70s. Different times.

I mostly knew it from Burroughs.

 

[Yaarel]

Looking further, the Defendent's Exhibits are described at page 220; Exhibits 8 (page 13-14) and 9 (page 15) "were prepared by David Megarry at witness' request", and Exhibit 10 (pages 16-17) is handwriting unknown (Arneson later says it's not his on page 296).

These Exhibits are further described by Arneson around page 294. It's not clear to me from a quick review whether these were prepared before or after the 1973 draft document.

Exhibit 8 (PDF 13-14) describes the game that Arneson is already playing.

Arneson testifies (PDF 294-295). Arneson "dictated" these outline notes to Megarry who handwrote it, at Arnesons "request". It is the "proposed outline for the organization of Dungeons & Dragons", that was "transmitted" to Gygax.

David Megarry is one of the original players of Dave Arnesons game.

The draft for the Dungeons & Dragons game, typed up by Gygax, incorporates these notes by Arneson.

 

[robertsconley]

We see from the notes by Arneson, what the rules for his game look like. His rules are D&D. Arneson invented D&D.

Serious research into the development of D&D has been ongoing since the late 2000s thanks to folks like Jon Peterson who wrote Playing at the World and others like the Hawk & Moor series and the various forums that the original players hang out at.

While there were several missing pieces folks understood how D&D was developed. What these files provide are confirmation and details of what is the earliest version of D&D we know exists along with details provided some of the correspondence between Gygax and Arneson.

We also know that this whole thing got started with Dave getting tired of running a grand Napoleanic campaign. He creates a fantasy Braunstein and crucially decides to run it as a campaign rather than as a one-shot as Wesely did. Dave wasn't the only one doing this. We know that Duane Jenkins was running a Wild West Braunstein campaign and that there was another based on Roman Gladiators.

But Dave's Blackmoor proved to be one of the most popular, and he had a lot of players playing the good guys and bad guys. In addition, every account by his players paints him as an awesome referee who was willing to go along with his player's crazy ideas (within reason) and willing to do the work to come up with rules to make it happen. They describe him as being exceptionally well at coming up with things on the fly.

The final pieces of what turned Blackmoor into the first tabletop roleplaying campaign was the introduction of the Blackmoor Dungeon. Soon exploring the dungeons became more popular than playing out the ongoing conflict between Law and Chaos (Baddies). Prior to the dungeon the accounts were focused on military exploits and adventuring to gain allies, items, and advantage in the Law vs. Chaos conflict. And something that most don't get is that there were only a few what we called NPCs; the antagonists (chaos) and the protagonists (law) were both groups of players.

All of this is documented by numerous accounts and in a half dozen books.

Gygax and his group hear about this and invite Dave down to Lake Geneva. Dave takes the most portable aspect he has the Blackmoor Dungeons. He has everybody there make up characters and ran them through the Blackmoor Dungeons. Impressed Gary asks Dave for some notes, get them, types up what we know as the Fantasy Rules, runs his kids and later friends through a dungeon of his own Greyhawk. Then types up the draft we see in the court files, sends it to Dave, and the development of D&D begins with Dave editing, and commenting on the book that Gary is writing.

We also know Dave rules were not the same as what Gary wrote up. Dave did contribute some elements like monsters, treasure tables. But Dave never wrote up the rules he used to run Blackmoor. Instead we know from accounts he had a binder filled with notes, charts, and tables he used for a reference. Occasionally, he would give a copy of some crucial charts to a friend like Greg Svenson to run their own campaign or dungeon.

There are dozens of die hard Arneson fans who will kill to get their hands on that notebook but so far it hasn't surfaced. We do know bits and pieces, enough that the system used was Arneson's own. For example a character matrix that David Megarry kept obviously relied on a 2d6 skill system. From First Fantasy Campaign we know the magic system was not Vancian but relied on making spells from reagents.

And to make it more maddeningly, Dave was continually revising, deleting, and adding throughout the life of the Blackmoor Campaign, including switching to the published D&D rules.

You don't have to take my word for it. Just go to the forums and the books and read up for yourself.

The fact is that ever since serious research began there has been a Dave Arneson camp and a Gary Gygax camp. With folks wanting to paint one or the other as the "villain" in the story.

The truth as it often is in the middle. Dave Arneson figured out tabletop roleplaying. He started Blackmoor as a fantasy Braunstein campaign and bit by bit in the coming years he added this and that until it was a tabletop roleplaying campaign. Then he showed Gygax a part of what he did.

Gygax was a go-getter who was disciplined and organized enough to write and publish wargames. Inspired by what Dave did, he asked Dave to teach how to run a tabletop roleplaying campaign, wrote up a set of formal rules, got Dave to help him edit them and comment on them. In addition he came up with some of his own ideas from the running the Greyhawk dungeon campaign. Made a final version and published it as Dungeon & Dragons.

There is no path to our present-day hobby that doesn't run through those two men. Gygax would not have written D&D without Dave Arneson, nor would any type of RPG rules would have been published without Gary Gygax. While there were other campaigns being run at the time undoubtedly one of them may have led to a published set of rules. They would have led to a very different hobby in that alternative history.

One thing people often miss that Dave and Gary didn't just co-authored a set of rules, they together refined the dungeon adventure. Out of all the different types of adventures one could run with tabletop role-playing, the dungeon is perhaps the easiest to describe to a novice. Take a sheet of graph paper, make a maze with rooms, and leave some empty, some with monsters, some with treasure, and a few with puzzles. Place the players as their characters at the top of the stairs leading down into the maze. If you want more adventure make additional levels and place them underneath or above the first level you created.

The other proto-roleplaying campaigns didn't have anything like the dungeon thus would have led to a very different type of game and hobby.

Finally, you have to understand that in the late 60s and early 70s there wasn't a lot of published material for miniature wargaming. Instead what you had is a bunch of collective "rules of thumb" people found useful when setting up a particular scenario or later campaign. They also didn't just make up naughty word out of thin air, they started out with some sources from history or fiction and then came up with the rules to use for the scenario or campaign. They also didn't hesitate to borrow stuff from the few existing games they knew about like Diplomacy.

The overall impact of this was the default was to think of something fun to play and then assemble the rules to play it. Greg Svenson's Tonisberg Dungeon were a good example. He played in Dave's campaign, knew the general gist of how to run a campaign and a dungeon, asked Dave for some help, who provided Greg with some charts and references, and then Greg came up with the rest. Dave wasn't passing out rulebooks for other players to use.

Only after the draft we see in the court files do we find people making a document we would recognize a RPG rulebook.

The D&D of Arneson has five ability scores (Intelligence, Cunning, Strength, Health, Appearance), the same abilities that the early draft of D&D uses. And so on with the other fundamental rules of D&D that Arneson invented.

As you can see from one example I posted, the Megarry sheet has a very different set of character attributes.

 

[Yaarel]

First, the actual issues in the case were not about who "created D&D," but rather about the specific contract that assigned rights and gave royalties to both Gygax and Arneson. Yes, there were collateral issues raised by affirmative defenses that would go to the issue of how much of a contribution was made to the original rules, but at its heart, this was about construing the contract, and then determining whether or not additional works were covered by the language of the original contract. Okay?

That is what I said, when referring to AD&D being a "derivative work".

Next, there was no court finding. The case was not resolved at motion practice. It was not resolved at summary judgment. It was headed to a trial, when (at a moment of maximum leverage, given that TSR was booming and they did not want any possible cloud over the IP as they were exploring licensing) ... there was a settlement. That's not a court finding. That's a settlement.

Fair enough. TSR settled out of court.

But, because, the court case by Arneson is strong.